A pop a day keeps boredom away!

When I was a kid, I thought Cool Whip was the end-all, be-all of dessert ingredients. I wished we could have that on our ice cream rather than the boring homemade whipped cream my dad always insisted on making (I also adored iced tea made from powdered mix and far preferred potato buds to the real thing. I was a strange kid). And I was completely fascinated by desserts that combined Cool Whip and Jello. I don’t recall ever having tasted a magic jello parfait (where plain Jello is layered with a Cool Whip/Jello mixture), but they looked pretty in the ads, and I was sure they’d be fabulous.
I still have never had one of those parfaits, but I thought it’d be fun to make an ice pop in that spirit:

Orange Jello was always my favorite.

I mixed the Jello mix with the hot water it called for, then poured 2-3 tablespoons of it over about 1/4 cup of thawed cool whip. I added cold water to the remaining Jello and poured that as my first ice pop layer. Once that froze, I poured in the creamy mixture. I was a little concerned that it would not freeze hard enough with the Cool Whip, but I hoped that the plain layer would anchor the ice pop sticks and allow me to unmold the pops. I also made one plain Jello ice pop, as insurance.

The layered pops came out just fine, but to my shock, this is what happened when I tried to unmold the plain pop:

I don’t know what happened here, I think maybe there was some ice gathered in the bottom of my Zoku. I have never had a “normal” pop stick before. But at least the layered pops are pretty:

The mousse layer was really soft — I definitely would not make an entire pop out of it, because there’s no way they’d come out of the molds intact. But as a layer, they’re really nice. And they tasted just as good as my childhood cravings had imagined.